I believe there is an old Dilbert comic that shows Dilbert's pointy-haired boss asking the development team to 'design everything you can think of so I can choose which one I want'.

This is the problem when management is seen as simply decision making (or worse, as deal making) rather than allocating scarce resources and assuming responsibility.

Of course, everybody knows this. Everybody can say they are pragmatic. However, there are still many fallacious arguments made disguised as pragmatic management.

While I see management activities and expertise as something that is inherently task-specific I still tackle every management challenge as a general management challenge. Part of this is recognising when planning is being faked.

Take an example that I often hear from test managers. Test managers try and tell me that they will prioritorise which test cases they are going to produce and/or execute by listing all of the possible test conditions that could be tested and then assigning a priority to each one. On other occations the test manager doesn't even intend to take responsibility for the prioritorisation of the test conditions. In these caes business stakeholders are asked (after they have already prioritorised features and other requirements) to do the prioritorisation for the test manager.

Now the problem with the extreme version of this approach � where business stakeholders do the actual prioritorisation � is that it gives up responsibility for testing. Give up responsibility and your really can't say you're managing anything.

The more subtle problems come from the specifics of the testing problem domain. Testing is one of those unbounded activities that you can devote as much or as little effort as you like to. Within that there are also extremes of effectiveness with regards to that effort which essensially represents the quality of your testing.

By taking a brute-force approach to prioritorising the testing effort you are ignoring the test design process. You are still designing test cases � but you are not tracking (managing) the effort. Worse still you are taking a 'default' design which is the default result of the unmanaged process you have ignored. If this is your approach there is no guarantee that your actions will result in higher quality activity than would have been performed if you were there.

The problem is that this behaviour doesn't have to be on purpose or malicious to occur - it simply has to be the behavior encouraged by the organisation.